Friday 30 December 2011 17.55 EST
First published on Friday 30 December 2011 17.55 EST

"Is there any enthusiasm for anything left in the world? Do people still know how to sacrifice themselves? Can they enjoy life, behave foolishly, and have hopes for the future? If I could see it all, I might know." Ivan Turgenev, then aged 40, wrote these words in a letter to his friend Countess Lambert on 24 June 1859, days before he began work on his third novel, On the Eve. He was, as he wrote in that same letter, "in that half-elated, half-depressed mood which always takes possession of me before working; but," he continued, "if I were younger I would stop working altogether, go off to Italy and breathe that now doubly beneficial air." The "doubly" was because Garibaldi, that great man of action, had launched his campaign to unify Italy. In fact, the day Turgenev wrote his letter was the day of the Battle of Solferino, an international military conflict that marked an end to an era in which armies were led personally by their monarchs. The world was about to change. This was one reason behind the title; another – declared by the author himself – was that On the Eve was published the year before the emancipation of the serfs. Also, the novel is set in the summer of 1853, the eve of the devastating war that set the Russian empire against an alliance that included the Ottoman, British and French empires. The Crimean war broke out in October of that year. By the time Turgenev began writing his novel, the outcome of the conflict was known.

He had spent the spring of 1859 filling one notebook after another with biographies of the characters. In the case of the sculptor Shubin, he went so far as to keep a diary on his character's behalf. The tragic heroine of the novel, the self-sacrificing Elena, who dreams of duty but does not know for what, had occurred to him some six years before, during his confinement in Russia as a result of the Crimean war. He was living in Spasskoye, the country estate he had inherited from his mother. Vasily Vladimirovich Karatayev, "a splendid young man – almost our only decent neighbour", had come by one evening to say goodbye to Turgenev before leaving for the front. Having the premonition that he might not return, the "splendid young man" handed Turgenev a diary containing the intimate record of his love affair with a woman who had at first reciprocated Karatayev's affections but later gave her heart to another man, a Bulgarian revolutionary. She left Russia with him but, soon after arriving in his country, the Bulgarian died. He was a well-known radical in Russia and Turgenev had met him. "At that time," he reflected years later, "among Russians such a figure did not yet exist". Karatayev never returned to collect his notebook; he died in the war.

During that summer of 1859, once he actually started writing the novel, Turgenev became so absorbed that anything that got in the way upset him. Even Paris began to disgust him: "Everything French stinks in my nostrils." It did not help that, at the time and with great imperial pomp, Napoleon III was reviewing his troops in Paris. "Every military festival is a horror to me," Turgenev wrote to his friend the writer and critic Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov. Turgenev escaped to Courtavenel, where Pauline Viardot, the woman he loved till the end of his days but could never possess, lived with her husband and children. There he sat writing by an open window, looking, as he wrote to Annenkov, "at the motionless garden, slowly mixing fragments of the imagination with memories of distant friends and distant Russia".

In September he returned to Spasskoye, and on 25 October, three days before his 41st birthday, he completed On the Eve. The novel he had been thinking about for six years was written in less than three months. But his misgivings were suddenly overwhelming. He questioned every element of the book and became convinced that the entire structure was in some mysterious way faulty. He sent it to Countess Lambert, to whom he had promised to dedicate the novel. Her judgment was unequivocal: she hated it. And, in case he doubted her verdict, she got her husband to provide an identical second opinion.

The author built a fire in the drawing room of his St Petersburg apartment. In his hand he held the manuscript, written in a notebook given to him by Viardot, with the words "May I bring you luck" written in her hand on the cover. Had Annenkov not arrived then, this literary gem might have been lost for ever. He rescued the manuscript from the fire, and with it Turgenev's confidence. This must be partly why, in his last years, Turgenev wrote that the dearest people to him were the Viardot family, Gustave Flaubert and Annenkov.

Turgenev's procrastination was infamous. He travelled endlessly. His letters and itinerary paint a picture of a writer who throughout his life remained reluctant to surrender fully to the demands of his craft. He was not only a "born spectator", as he mockingly liked to call himself, but also a privately anxious man. It is as if he carried with him the unease of his country and his class. At times, Turgenev, the man Henry James liked to call "the beautiful genius", felt more at home in Paris or Baden-Baden than he did in St Petersburg. These stretches of exile were not always motivated by political reasons. When many Russian writers escaped to Paris on ideological or political grounds, Turgenev followed, but probably so that he could be near the Viardots. When his compatriots returned, he remained abroad. It is this Hamlet-like position – he had a deep interest in Shakespeare's play – that allowed Turgenev to write so well about love and politics, about waiting, hope, fate, uncertainty and paralysis. But although he did not write only for Russians, he always wrote with his people in mind. You can hear it in the tenor of the prose. At times he seemed fixed on exposing Russia, reminding it that a great world existed outside its borders. But what he was offering could not always be taken for a warm invitation to a more internationalist attitude. At one point in On the Eve he chooses to interrupt a character's speech to place this piece of commentary: "Russians love to be generous – if with nothing else, with their own friends." And later, when the young scholar Bersyenev, who "no one looking at his angular figure would have thought that he too was enjoying himself", visits his friend, the Bulgarian radical Insarov, we are told that Insarov escorted Bersyenev to the door with a "friendly civility little seen in Russia".

Turgenev's belief that Russian life was not holy led many artists and intellectuals to question his Russianness. His preference for spending long stretches abroad had opened him up to the accusation of being a "European" writer. Abroad, particularly in western Europe, he often provoked the sort of enthusiasm that was motivated less by recognition of his genius than by the feeling that the best thing about him was that he was not really very Russian; and that, because he was approved by Gustave Flaubert, Émile Zola and Henry James, he was not as threatening as those unruly giants Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Such misapprehensions overlooked the fact that Turgenev's life and work were deeply involved with Russia. The frustration he felt towards his work was equalled only by the impatience he felt towards his own country. And the two senses of discontent were often interchangeable: fears that he had not fully committed to his vocation mirrored his critique of the Russian gentry's dilettantism. But most of all his themes of love and rebellion, of fathers and sons, articulated painful truths about the historical moment Russia was at in the latter half of the 19th century.

The questions Turgenev asked in his letter to Countess Lambert – "Is there any enthusiasm for anything left in the world?" – haunt the atmosphere of On the Eve. Each character is marked by unfulfilled promise. Here Turgenev was expressing concerns provoked by the dramatic transformations about to take place. He was caught between impatient anticipation and his moderate nature, a nature innately suspicious of political enthusiasm. Turgenev watched the prospective emancipation of the serfs polarise Russian intellectual life. On one side there were the radicals and revolutionaries with their fiery passions, and, on the other, the tsar and the liberal elite with their timid reforms. His nuanced position – sympathetic with the radicals yet critical of their tendency to set one class against another – drove some, including Tolstoy, to accuse him of a lack of commitment. But it is exactly this gentle temperament that gives On the Eve its calm independence and grace.

There is a curious moment in the novel that is both subtle and devastating. Bersyenev commends to Elena, the woman he loves and who loves him back, the virtues of another man. He paints his friend Insarov, a Bulgarian living far away in Moscow, in a deliberately favourable light. The power with which he manages to insert the Bulgarian into Elena's thoughts is as puzzling as his motive for doing so. Then suddenly, as Bersyenev is speaking of Insarov's commitment to free Bulgaria, Elena says: "To liberate his native land … merely to say the words fills one with a feeling of awe." Juxtaposing a lover cheating himself out of happiness with Elena's conception of what it might be like to be from a subjugated country resonates with mysterious force. It illuminates something about how history and nations affect the way people love and dream. Perhaps a person who rejects love and nature (for the two are often connected in Turgenev's work) is not unlike a country living under tyranny – both states inflict a grief similar to the one Bersyenev feels once he is back in the privacy of his room, when he senses "something dark and secret" entering his heart and is overcome with a sadness that has nothing noble in it.

Where Turgenev is less convincing is in his attempts to force the work to stand for something pertinent. A question On the Eve asks more than once is when Russia will ever have real men, presumably men like Garibaldi or Napoleon – men whom, by all accounts, Turgenev would have found intolerable. It is a question that seems to express the anxiety he must have felt about the chasm that inevitably exists between an artist's work and opinions. What Turgenev said about On the Eve often sounded affected by his desire to satisfy the currents of the time. Sometimes it was as if he were speaking about another book altogether. "My tale," he once said, long after the book was written, "is based on the idea that we must have consciously heroic natures in order to move forward."

Turgenev's achievement lies in how he succeeded, in spite of himself, his country and his time, in exempting his work from public duty. This has given it that unnameable quality that makes every sentence true, every silence trustworthy.